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It's my great pleasure to present our first speaker tonight.
It's NCRA's CEO and Executive Director, Jim Cudahy.
Jim is a Certified Association Executive with more than 20 years of experience.
And you're only 30, wow! (Jim laughs)
He was chosen to lead our staff in June of 2012.
One of his first acts as CEO was to announce Court Reporting and
Captioning Week, which was a huge success.
Tonight, he's sharing stories about the event in a presentation called, "Steno
in the Spotlight." Please welcome him to the stage.
(applause) Thank you. Thank you, Tami.
So, as Tami said, as long as I've been at NCRA, one of the things that I've heard
from people is more and more people need to know what it is that court
reporters do. People don�t know what we do. We
need to go out there. So when we rely on court reporters to
go out and try to explain it first-hand, it gets a little confusing.
You start talking about shorthand; you start talking about method; you start
talking about application. And what ends up happening is that
the people you're talking to basically go, "Huh?"
"You're a journalist? You cover the courts?"
"You're a reporter? I don't quite get it."
So what we have attempted to do is to create a set of tools that...
Well, one of the things that happen is that members come to me with
profanity-laced statements and say, "BLANK, people need to know what we do!"
People need to know. Just, whatever we do,
we need to make sure that people understand what court
reporters do. And they say, "Just do what Apple
does." I mean, Apple, they go out, they
advertise, they get coverage in the newspaper, they use skywriters,
billboards, anything that they can do. Just do what Apple does.
But the problem that we run into is that Apple, if you look at their budget,
is the equivalent of the Petronas Towers, the tallest building in the
world in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Whereas our budget is more like an
ant. But it's a hardworking ant.
NCRA members, if they're ants, they're the hardest working ants that there
are. And we all know that they're willing to
go out and use their strengths to do what they can to spread goodwill and
go out and promote the profession where they can.
So what we did was we established a set of tools under the Stenadvocate
program under the membership tools section of our website.
Presentations, templates and so forth that you can use to go out and
promote the profession. The only thing is that we did all that,
and members were like...
"Give us something more. Give us something we can sink our teeth into!"
"Give us something that's a little simpler and that we really can get
excited about." So last year when I became CEO, I
went out and I did a listening tour among vendors and our members and
state associations and so forth, and I stopped by Chicago and when I
was in John Wenclawski's office at Stenograph, we came up with the idea
of Court Reporting Week. And the idea of Court Reporting Week
would be to create a perfect storm of coverage during a single week where
we would use all of our muscle to get student recruitment,
awareness of the profession, do a social media blitz, do advertising, make
use of our state associations, members, schools and vendors.
Everyone pushing in the same direction.
And we used the fall and the early winter to start building some
momentum for this to get the members excited about it.
To basically give you all of the tools that you needed to go out and do it.
And then once we started in February with it, we weren't subtle.
We went out there every single day with a single step that everybody could
do that day and... just go out to your clients and to your
communities and to the high schools in your communities, make
presentations, work hard that one single week, disproportionately.
And it really started to work. Our members really grabbed onto it.
Went out, made the presentations, they sent out press releases using our
templates, they were all over social media, and it was just a major, major
success. We also got... within the U.S. Congress,
we got special recognition of Court Reporting and Captioning week, as we
came to call it. We also got the same type of
recognition within our states, within Illinois and Georgia.
And our social media numbers have never been stronger. They just were
off the charts. We gave everybody special logos that
they could apply about their certifications.
Everybody used them and went out on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn,
everywhere. And then the media coverage ensued.
We got newspaper articles in Minnesota, and Georgia, and as far
away as Australia. We got TV coverage. Our schools were
going crazy with this stuff. It was just a phenomenal success. We
were extremely pleased. But my two favorite stories were, one,
we had a firm owner who said, "We had an open house, we got a new
client, I convinced a student to enroll in court
reporting school, and one of our clients even sent us a bouqet of
flowers. And just recently, a school
administrator told us that they expect that with everything NCRA has done
through Court Reporting and Captioning Week, their new
enrollment will double in the fall. But we need to keep it going.
(applause) This wasn't an end, it was a beginning.
We need you to make a presentation at a high school; attend a local bar
association meeting; work with a court reporting school;
send a press release; make use of NCRA's resources.
And then next year, we'll come back on top of that. We'll do another Court
Reporting and Captioning Week. Mark your calendars: February 16th to
the 22nd, 2014 Court Reporting and Captioning Week.
(applause) Thank you. (applause)